Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea
David Konstan
Abstract
This book has two aims. The first is to determine how the ancient Greeks conceived of beauty—a matter that is not uncontroversial, since some scholars have denied that there existed an autonomous concept of beauty in classical Greece. This question is addressed by an investigation of Greek terminology, singling out in particular, and for the first time, the significance of the noun kállos, as opposed to the adjective kalós. On this basis, the book addresses the role of beauty in sexual attraction, class, art, Platonic idealism, and other areas, and offers a comparison between Greek, Hebrew, an ... More
This book has two aims. The first is to determine how the ancient Greeks conceived of beauty—a matter that is not uncontroversial, since some scholars have denied that there existed an autonomous concept of beauty in classical Greece. This question is addressed by an investigation of Greek terminology, singling out in particular, and for the first time, the significance of the noun kállos, as opposed to the adjective kalós. On this basis, the book addresses the role of beauty in sexual attraction, class, art, Platonic idealism, and other areas, and offers a comparison between Greek, Hebrew, and Latin terms for beauty. The book’s second aim is to identify problems that have beset modern aesthetics, such as whether a work of art can be beautiful if its subject matter is not, and to indicate why these difficulties did not pose a problem for the ancient idea of beauty. In the process, the book shows how beauty lost its preeminent place as the central concept in modern aesthetics, and how the ancient conception may contribute to restoring beauty, if not to its former preeminence, at least to a auxiliary role in our understanding of desire and of art.
Keywords:
beauty,
aesthetics,
art,
desire,
kállos,
kalós,
Greek culture
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199927265 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199927265.001.0001 |
